Helping Farmers Get a Handle on Transition Management

With experience on farms in New Zealand and the UK, and an honours degree in agriculture, Charlotte moved into a role as a farm consultant. She has since worked as a Training Specialist at CowManager NZ for over two years, and lives at Jacob’s River Farm in Southland, where she and her husband Callum peak milk 680 cows.

South Island Success Stories

This Training Specialist doesn’t just talk the talk; she walks the walk. Charlotte helps clients based on her experience as a specialist as well as her own experience as a system user; she’s actually tagged her own herd with CowManager ear sensors. She and Callum installed the cow monitoring system on their own farm and have worked with it every day for the past two years. They use the Fertility Module for heat detection, the Nutrition Module for feed and transition management, as well as the Health Module for catching disease early and tracking recovery.

“My partner is the farm manager. It’s good for me to see CowManager in practice. I find that’s quite good for our clients, as well. Because I have used it, I do use it and I know what it looks like,” she explains. “My role is working with people on how to use the system and looking at the different modules, talking to vets and consultants and farmers and showing them how to use CowManager.”

She uses her experience to help CowManager users in the South Island use the system to its full potential. Charlotte’s passionate about the dairy business and all its continuing innovations, and she knows the system inside out. Her favourite part of the job is seeing farmers light up when they learn something new or start to personally experience and understand the benefits of the system.

“Seeing improvements in six-week in-calf rates, empty rates, people who have had milk fever issues being able to get on top of that before it’s an issue. Hearing the success stories, that’s really cool,” she says.

Perfect Tool for Transition Period

Out of all the different modules CowManager offers, Charlotte’s especially specialised in the Nutrition Module, which happens to be her personal favourite. According to her, one major benefit of the Nutrition Module is the ability to look at data from individual cows and compare that to the rest of the herd. You can also split the cows into separate groups.

Charlotte explains: “Say, you had one group that wintered on beets and one that wintered on grass and bailage. You could compare the different transitions for those.”

She believes the Nutrition Module is an extremely important informational tool during the transition period. In the transition period 75% of all adult cow disease events find their origin. With the Nutrition Module, farmers and their team can identify these ‘at-risk’ cows up to 50 days before calving and avoid herd health surprises after calving.

For instance, if dry cows show decreased eating and rumination behaviour and therefore have a higher risk of becoming ill after calving, users will immediately receive an alert. It helps farmers to intervene early and, more importantly, prevent losses.

“For a cow that had a really tough time over winter, she’ll keep giving you transition alerts. It’s looking after the individuals but also seeing the big picture and being able to make improvements on that,” she says.

Diving Into Cow Data Together

For Charlotte, learning new things through cow data has always been fun. She hopes she’ll be able to infect others with that enthusiasm. Not just farmers, but nutritionists, vets, and other consultants as well. With the MultiView function in the CowManager system, remote consultants and staff can get access to cow data with just one click. This allows teams to come to new insights and analyse data together, all the way back to the date of install.

“Get your vets and consultants on board too because a lot of them are really enjoying learning the system. And just enjoy, have fun!”

In her role as Training Specialist, she comes across many different types of (new) system users. From people who eagerly jump right in, to people who are afraid to accidentally ‘mess up’ anything in the system, therefore not using it to its full potential.

“My advice for a beginner would be: You cannot break CowManager. If you want to find something out, just keep clicking, look at the reports, look at the graphs, look at the cows, have a play with it to understand it. So, get stuck in, enjoy it; click as much as you can.”